Customer relationship management (CRM) systems for customer care are used to manage businesses' interactions their customers. CRM software systems are designed to help reduce costs and increases profitability by solidifying customer loyalty. Effective CRM systems bring together information from all data sources within an organization (and where appropriate, from outside the organization) to give one, holistic view of each customer in real-time. This allows customer facing employees in such areas as sales, customer support, and marketing to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and upselling opportunities to target marketing strategies to competitive positioning tactics.
The explosion in social media and social networks is changing the way people connect and communicate, much of it occurring in real-time and near-real-time. As used herein, “social media” and the “social web” encompass and include any or all online services and networked technologies (such as social networks, blogs, forums, microblogs, review sites, news sites and surveys), in which consumers and customers are permitted or encouraged to communicate, share, publish or review ideas, product, people or other subjects among one or more collaborators. The content generated within these technologies is called user-generated content. As used herein “real-time” means the real-time and near real-time enabling of users to receive information over the web as soon as it is published by its authors. Millions of Internet-based social interactions occur daily and large subsets of those interactions involve product service or support problems currently being experience by customers. Social media is disrupting customer care in that demographic shifts have caused phone support to be used only as a last resort. There are an ever increasing number of ways that customers request support which results in multiple social network and traditional support channels that need to be serviced by a business. Furthermore, customers have discovered they get better support when they complain publicly and visibly. Legacy CRM systems were built around phone as the core support channel and are not well-suited to processing and organizing social network information. This often results in bad user experiences that cause negative publicity and missed opportunities to have positive and visible interactions with customers and prospects.
In addition, there is an increasing use of online Internet support communities (sometimes called peer-to-peer support) that allow customers to self-service support problems by searching knowledge bases or web-content for their problem and posted solutions or by asking questions on-line and getting support from another user. Customers that care about their brand and servicing customer realize that they should monitor and participate in these Internet support social media communities and integrating social media data into their CRM and customer support systems.
Social CRM attempts to integrate social websites and related technology into traditional CRM systems to provide another way for businesses to connect with customers and prospects. Social CRM that provides customer support differs from most of the existing social media solutions that have been designed for marketing, that is, connecting with prospects and existing customers to sell new products and solutions, and not designed for use by a customer service agent to provide customer service and support.